Typically, a consumer may spend countless hours searching the internet to collect information about a particular point of interest. In many instances, the consumer may have to search a plurality of websites in order to collect all of the information. A consumer may also contact various peers via an instant messaging program or a social network to share opinions regarding a point of interest.
Meanwhile, E-business merchants and marketers devote numerous resources to identify consumer intentions. Based on these intentions, merchants and marketers attempt to implement effective approaches to attract consumers to their websites in order to market and sell their products and/or services.
Traditionally, E-business merchants and marketers have applied a variety of techniques to attract customers to their products and services. One technique is to display banner advertisements on a third party website to attract customers to their own website. However, the process of negotiating with a third party website to acquire advertising space can be arduous and certain websites which may be desirable to advertise on may not allow banner advertisements.
Another technique which bypasses negotiating with a third party website is the pop-up advertisement. The pop-up advertisement can be linked to a particular website so that when the website is viewed the pop-up advertisement is initiated. One problem with pop-up advertisements is that they have reached a critical mass on the internet. Consumers usually disregard pop-up advertisements because they encounter such a large quantity of them. Moreover, many internet browsers have integrated pop-up advertisement blocking software into their programs. As a result, pop-up advertising has become an outdated form of internet marketing.
In addition, market research firms have begun to implement behavioral targeting, by attempting to track a user's behaviors over tracked multiple websites. However, current tracking systems typically require that the user device accept and keep cookies from third parties, which is increasingly disfavored among some computer users as raising security and privacy concerns. Further, it is difficult to tell if a detected click is intentionally engaged in by a user, or is effected by a robot, which calls the validity of such tracking statistics into question.